K

Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

 

Kagemusha The Shadow Warrior (1980)—Warfare is treated dispassionately in this epic film in color by Kurosawa, which is set during the wars of the clans in 16th-century Japan (the period just before the country was unified). Kurosawa seems to be saying that wisdom dictates caution, security, stasis, but that to be alive is to be subject to impulse, to chaos. The film’s style is ceremonial rather than dramatic; it’s not battle that Kurosawa is interested in here but formations in battle regalia. He appears to see war as part of the turmoil of life, and he asks us simply to observe what he shows us. Perhaps he thinks that this way the horror will reach us at a deeper level. But he’s also in love with the aesthetics of warfare—he’s a schoolboy setting up armies of perfect little soldiers and smiling at the patterns he has devised. These two sets of feelings may have neutralized Kagemusha —put it at a remove and made it somewhat abstract. The film seems fixated on mountains, triangles, and threes. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the warlord known as The Mountain, and he also plays the thieving peasant who has been condemned to death but whose life is spared so that he can serve as the lord’s double. Written by Kurosawa and Masato Ide. In Japanese. (See Taking It All In.)

 

Kagi The Key Also known as Odd Obsession. (1959)—Perverse in the best sense of the word. As a treatment of sexual opportunism it’s a bit reminiscent of Double Indemnity, but it’s infinitely more complex. At the start, a young doctor, sensual and handsome, smug with sexual prowess, tells us that his patient, an aging man, is losing his virility. And the old man bends over and bares his buttocks—to take an injection. But the old man doesn’t get enough charge from the injection, so he induces the young doctor, who is his daughter’s suitor, to make love to his wife. By observing them, by artificially making himself jealous, the old man is able to raise his spirits a bit. The comedy, of course, is that the wife, superbly played by Machiko Kyo, is the traditional, obedient Japanese woman—and she cooperates in her husband’s plan. She is so cooperative that, once aroused by the young doctor, she literally kills her old husband with kindness—she excites him to death. (It’s both a perfect suicide and a perfect murder.) The title—the key—fits the Tanizaki novel that the film is based on, but the film might better be called the keyhole. Everybody is spying on everybody else, and although each one conceals his motives and actions, nobody is fooled. The screen is our keyhole, and we are the voyeurs who can see them all peeking at each other. When the old man takes obscene pictures of his wife, he gives them to the young man to develop. The young man shows them to his fiancée, the daughter, whose reaction is that she can do anything her mother can do. A further layer of irony is that she can’t—the film is also a withering satire on the Westernized modern Japanese girl. As the mother, Machiko Kyo, with her soft, sloping shoulders and her rhythmic padding walk, is like some ancient erotic fantasy. Directed by Kon Ichikawa, this film about pornography would be just about perfect if it didn’t have a stupid tacked-on ending (that isn’t in the novel). In Japanese. color (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

Kameradschaft (1931)—Based on an actual incident in which German miners crossed the border to go to the assistance of French miners trapped by an explosion, G. W. Pabst’s study of disaster and rescue is a powerful and imaginative re-creation of a high moment in human comradeship. The socialist-pacifist implications which Pabst sees in the episode had tremendous international impact in the days when people were more idealistic. In the early 30s it was still possible for large audiences to believe in the symbolic revolutionary meaning of smashing through artificial frontiers for the sake of natural brotherhood. This movie belongs to a genre that has disappeared. Technically a brilliant achievement, Kameradschaft is famous among film craftsmen for the experimental use of sound, and for magnificent creative editing. The subterranean scenes have a nightmarish authenticity. The cast of French and German players includes Alexander Granach and Elizabeth Wendt. In German. b & w

 

Kanchenjungha (1962)—Satyajit Ray made this ambitious film in color on location in Darjeeling in 1961 (though it didn’t open in the U.S. until 1966). Under the primitive working circumstances, the story about love and ambition and the collision of cultures was perhaps too complex, but the setting and the beautiful women help to compensate for the awkwardness and naivete. With Chhabi Biswas. In Bengali.

 

Kaos Also known as Chaos. (1984)—Partly financed by Italian television, this film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is composed of adaptations of four folkloric Pirandello stories set in Sicily, plus a prologue and an epilogue. It was intended to be shown on TV, in four installments, as well as in theatres, and when foreign distributors bought the rights to present it theatrically the Tavianis suggested that they should cut one story or another—the one least likely to appeal to their country’s tastes. The American distributor decided to run the film in toto. That might be called exemplary, but the result is a mixed blessing. At 3 hours and 8 minutes it’s too much movie, and too much harsh beauty. The panoramic grandeur wears you down. You feel emotionally filled by the first and second stories, which are about fate and have superb moments. During the third and fourth, which are about trickery, you feel surfeited. They’re hardly worth sitting through, but they take you to the revivifying epilogue, which is a full-fledged epiphany and sends you out dazed and happy. There’s greatness in this movie, but it’s wise to be prepared for the passages that are clumsy and tedious; don’t get angry and leave, or you’ll lose the rapturous beauty of the epilogue. With the magnificent Margarita Lozano as the madwoman of the first story, and, in the final moments, Omero Antonutti as Pirandello. Tonino Guerra collaborated with the Tavianis on the script; the marvellous score is by Nicola Piovani; the cinematography is by Giuseppe Lanci. In Italian. Released by M-G-M/United Artists Classics. color (See Hooked.)

 

Keeper of the Flame (1943)—Tracy and Hepburn, but not a comedy, and not good, either. She plays the widow of a “great American”; Tracy is a journalist admirer of the dead man who wants to write the definitive biography. The widow won’t cooperate with him and puts obstacles in his path because she’s trying to conceal the fact that her husband was the secret head of a traitorous Fascist organization. The screenwriter, Donald Ogden Stewart, had become very political during the war years, and he seems to have felt it incumbent on him to stuff the script (based on I.A.R. Wylie’s novel) with anti-Fascism. Tracy is monotonous, and Hepburn looks beautiful but suffers all over the place and speaks mournfully, like a spiritualist’s medium. It’s a gothic wet blanket of a movie, directed by George Cukor, with an impressive, wasted cast—Richard Whorf, Frank Craven, Margaret Wycherly, Horace McNally, Donald Meek, Howard Da Silva, Percy Kilbride, and Audrey Christie. M-G-M. b & w

 

The Kennel Murder Case (1933)—One of the pleasanter films in the series starring the suave comedian William Powell as S. S. Van Dine’s detective Philo Vance. The plot involves some lively Scotties and a handsome Doberman, as well as that sinister figure, the connoisseur of Oriental objects of art. (In the 30s, Ming and murder always seemed to go together.) Mary Astor, at an in-between stage in her career, has a conventional role that doesn’t much suit her; however, most of the other players are cast so inevitably to type that the film is like a demonstration of the principles of running a stock company. The group includes snake-hipped Helen Vinson, wicked Jack La Rue, tedious Ralph Morgan, and Paul Cavanagh, Etienne Girardot, Robert Barrat, Eugene Pallette, Frank Conroy, Arthur Hohl, Henry O’Neill, and Robert McWade. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warners. b & w

 

Kentucky Kernels (1934)—One of the better-made Wheeler and Woolsey comedies, and also one of the most popular. George Stevens directed, and Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby did the story and provided the song “One Little Kiss.” Wheeler and Woolsey adopt a child (Spanky McFarland), go down to the South to claim his inheritance, and get caught in a feud between families headed by Noah Beery and Lucille LaVerne. With Mary Carlisle, Willie Best, and Margaret Dumont. R K O. b & w

 

La Kermesse héroïque, see Carnival in Flanders.

 

The Key, see Kagi

 

Key Largo (1948)—The soporific Maxwell Anderson play is an unlikely subject for John Huston but he steers a shrewd course, bailing Anderson out in order to stay afloat. What the play was supposed to be about—which was dim enough in the original—is even more obscure in the script that he and Richard Brooks (then a screenwriter) prepared, but the movie is so confidently and entertainingly directed that nobody is likely to complain. Huston fills the rancid atmosphere of the setting—a hotel in the Florida Keys—with suspense, ambiguous motives, and some hilariously hammy bits, and the cast all go at it as if the nonsense about gangsters and human dignity were high drama. Humphrey Bogart plays a Second World War veteran—a major who goes to the hotel, which is run by the widow (Lauren Bacall) and father (Lionel Barrymore) of one of his men. The major has become disillusioned about the value of fighting, but when gangsters (who are symbols of reaction, corruption, Hitlerism) take over the hotel and start killing people, he is forced into action. Bogart wins Bacall, who looks wonderful but gives a stiff, amateurish performance. The most memorable image is that of Edward G. Robinson, as the head racketeer, chomping on a cigar while soaking in a bathtub; he has, as Huston said, “the look of a crustacean with its shell off.” For diversion, this home-grown Hitler humiliates his aging, drunken mistress, played by Claire Trevor, who packed such a load of pathos into her role that she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Thomas Gomez, as one of the hoods, and Barrymore do their usual overacting. With Marc Lawrence, Dan Seymour, Monte Blue, Jay Silverheels, Harry Lewis, John Rodney, and Rodric Redwing. The handsome, airy cinematography is by Karl Freund; the music is by Max Steiner. Produced by Jerry Wald for Warners. b & w

 

The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)—Hollywood at its most virtuous. This account of the adventurous life of a 19th-century Scottish priest—a missionary in China—is like an ad for piety. The humble hero keeps telling people what an uninteresting sort of man he is, and with Gregory Peck in the role we believe it. His saintliness comes across as lack of imagination—utter sterility. How did Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Nunnally Johnson get trapped into writing the script, which is based on A. J. Cronin’s novel? (You couldn’t find two writers less suited, by temperament, to inspirational moviemaking.) The director, John M. Stahl, sets a slow, sanctimonious pace and holds to it, with Peck’s beautiful, uncharismatic face lighted “from within.” (He glows, hollowly.) This is perhaps the most dignified and sexless performance ever given by a rising young male star. With Cedric Hardwicke, Edmund Gwenn, Thomas Mitchell, Peggy Ann Garner, Roddy McDowall, Rose Stradner, Anne Revere, Ruth Nelson, Benson Fong, James Gleason, Sara Allgood, Edith Barrett, Abner Biberman, Vincent Price, Ruth Ford, Richard Loo, and Arthur Shields. Music by Alfred Newman. Mankiewicz produced, for 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

The Kid (1921)—The most enchantingly Victorian of Chaplin’s features, and perhaps because of the way his sentimentality (which was often awkward, and even mawkish, later) fits the subject, this film seems remarkably innocent and pure. Edna Purviance is the destitute young mother who abandons her infant; Charlie, the tramp, takes the child to his garret, and five years later the child (Jackie Coogan) smashes windows, which Charlie, now a glazier and wearing glass on his back like angel wings, repairs. The story is about the love between these two street waifs and about Charlie’s fight to keep the child out of the hands of the authorities. A little girl named Lita Grey (known as Lolita), later to be Chaplin’s wife, appears in a dream sequence set in Heaven. Silent. b & w

 

A Kid for Two Farthings (1955)—Wolf Mankowitz takes the language of the East End of London and uses it as a poetic idiom. And he transforms his characters into creatures of fantasy and fable. Directed by Carol Reed, this film has some of the same verbal magic that Mankowitz gave to The Bespoke Overcoat and Expresso Bongo, and many of the characters could step in and out of any of these films. In this one, a boy looks for the unicorn that can work miracles and finds a sick goat with one horn. Reed achieves enough small miracles to lift the film to an unfamiliar realm, but he can’t quite solve the problem of how to tell the story. The success of this type of fantasy depends on the contrast between the child’s world and the adult’s: in The Rocking Horse Winner, for example, the director stays outside the child’s world and we view what goes on inside with terror and apprehension; in White Mane, Albert Lamorisse helps us to enter the child’s domain. Here we are caught in a fairy tale set somewhere in between. The East End is made so fascinating that reality and fantasy are inseparable, and though a child may well apprehend them this way, the fabulous reality confuses the point for us. With Jonathan Ashmore, David Kossoff, Celia Johnson, Brenda de Banzie, Sidney James, Alfie Bass, Vera Day, Diana Dors, Joe Robinson, and Primo Carnera as the ogre. color

 

The Kid from Spain (1932)—Sam Goldwyn put a million dollars into this Eddie Cantor musical, and a fair number of them must have gone into the Busby Berkeley dance numbers. Berkeley stages a Spanish-café routine with the Goldwyn Girls forming a human tortilla, and an aquatic sequence with the Girls showing a lot of buxom wet flesh. (Some of the most attractive smiles belong to Lucille Ball, Betty Grable, Paulette Goddard, and Virginia Bruce.) Cantor and Robert Young play college boys who are innocently involved in a robbery; they escape to Mexico, where Cantor is mistaken for a matador and is forced to fight in the ring. The film has everything that money could buy—which does not include comic inspiration, though the final bullfight is fairly inventive. It’s Cantor himself who doesn’t wear well—maybe because he always retained his stage timing and delivery, which are too slow and broad for the camera. Leo McCarey directed, and Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote reasonably pleasant songs and also worked on the script. The cast includes Lyda Roberti, grinning with perverse vivacity, and Ruth Hall, Noah Beery, John Miljan, J. Carrol Naish, Stanley Fields, and the matador Sidney Franklin. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. A Samuel Goldwyn Production. b & w

 

Kid Galahad (1937)—By 1937, Bette Davis had earned something better than the role of Fluff, girlfriend to a fight manager (Edward G. Robinson), but the movie was directed by Michael Curtiz, and though it has few dimensions it has pace and “entertainment value.” Wayne Morris is the bellhop turned fighter, whom Fluff christens Kid Galahad; Humphrey Bogart is the bad guy; and Jane Bryan plays Robinson’s sister. With Harry Carey, the ineffable Veda Ann Borg as the Redhead, and, for the finale, a Warners’ operatic shootout in which Robinson and Bogart kill each other. (Remade in 1941, as Wagons Roll at Night, and in 1962, starring Elvis Presley.) b & w

 

Kidnapped (1971)—Jack Pulman has drawn a trim, craftsmanlike screenplay from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and its sequel, David Balfour. The director, Delbert Mann, keeps everything comprehensible, though he doesn’t seem to know how to make the narrative stirring. Fortunately, Michael Caine acts Alan Breck with a mixture of swagger and intelligence that keeps the movie alive. Caine is assisted by Trevor Howard as the Lord Advocate, Lawrence Douglas as David, and Donald Pleasence as old Ebenezer, a Scrooge if ever there was one. Not as exciting as the best swashbuckling adventure movies, but the feeling behind the whole production is so decent and affectionate that viewers may forgive the deficiencies. The exteriors were shot in Scotland. color

 

The Killer Elite (1975)—Sam Peckinpah’s poetic, corkscrew vision of the modern world, claustrophobically exciting. The somewhat incoherent story is about a professional killer (James Caan) who turns against his employers—a company with C.I.A. connections—but the energy and the humor appear to derive from Peckinpah’s own desire for revenge against his movie-business employers. With Gig Young, Robert Duvall, Burt Young, Bo Hopkins, and Arthur Hill. From a script by Marc Norman and Stirling Silliphant. United Artists. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Killers (1946)—Ernest Hemingway’s short story about the man who doesn’t try to escape his killers is acted out tensely and accurately, and, for once, the gangster-thriller material added to it is not just padding but is shrewdly conceived (by Anthony Veiller and the uncredited John Huston) to show why the man didn’t care enough about life to run away. Under the expert direction of Robert Siodmak, Burt Lancaster gives his first screen performance (and is startlingly effective), and Siodmak also does wonders with Ava Gardner. With Charles McGraw and William Conrad in the opening sequence, and Edmond O’Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, Donald MacBride, Vince Barnett, and Jeff Corey. (A 1964 version starring Lee Marvin and directed by Don Siegel was intended to be a TV movie but was considered too brutal and was released in theatres instead; the cast includes Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, and Ronald Reagan, at the end of his movie career, as a tough crook.) Universal. b & w

 

Killer’s Kiss (1955)—Stanley Kubrick’s second feature (after Fear and Desire, in 1953) is a poorly written New York-set thriller that culminates in a fight in a mannequin factory. It has vivid feeling for the tawdry milieu but not much else; it’s conceived in flashy sequences rather than as a believable story, and the guiding sensibility still seems light years away from Kubrick’s third feature, The Killing, in 1956. With Frank Silvera. Kubrick also shot the picture and did the writing and editing. United Artists. b & w

 

The Killing (1956)—Stanley Kubrick had made two pictures before this one, but they were juvenilia; this shrewdly worked out suspense film, which he made at the age of 27, is the real beginning of his career. Centering on a racetrack robbery, it has fast, incisive cutting; a nervous, edgy style; and furtive little touches of characterization. The cast includes many familiar second-string actors, but they go through enough unfamiliar movements to keep one in an agreeable state of anxious expectation. Sterling Hayden is impressive as the ex-convict who plans the crime (there’s a slight melancholy about him). With Elisha Cook, Jr., and fierce, tight Marie Windsor as his mismate; the generally underrated fine actress Coleen Gray; Jay C. Flip-pen; Timothy Carey as the sharpshooter; Ted de Corsia; Joe Sawyer; Vince Edwards; and Kola Kwarian as the chess-playing wrestler. Adapted by the director, from Lionel White’s novel Clean Break; cinematography by Lucien Ballard. Independently produced by Harris-Kubrick; released through United Artists. b & w

 

The Killing Fields (1984)—Based on Sydney Schanberg’s 1980 New York Times Magazine article “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” the British film shows us the Khmer Rouge transforming Cambodia into a nationwide gulag, and the scenes of this genocidal revolution have the breadth and terror of something deeply imagined. Like the article, the film tells the story of how Schanberg (Sam Waterston), who was the Times correspondent in Cambodia from 1972 to 1975, was separated from his interpreter and assistant, Pran (Haing S. Ngor), and of his remorse and general anguish until the wily, resourceful Pran, after four years of slave labor and hiding, made his way into Thailand, late in 1979, and got word to him. It’s an ambitious movie made with an inept, sometimes sly, and very often equivocal script (by Bruce Robinson); it’s written like a TV docudrama and it bogs down in the crosscutting between Pran’s experiences of the atrocities in Cambodia and Schanberg’s guilt and misery in various settings in the U.S. At times, it’s almost as if Cambodia only existed to make Waterston’s Schanberg suffer and soliloquize, endlessly asking, “Did I do what was right?” But it’s by no means a negligible movie. Roland Joffé, making his début as a movie director, and the cinematographer, Chris Menges, give us imagery that suggests the work of a macabre lyric poet, and there are accomplished performances—most notably by John Malkovich, Bill Paterson, and Athol Fugard. The score, by Mike Oldfield, mars some of the finest scenes; it insists on hyping death. The cast includes Craig T. Nelson, Spalding Gray, and Julian Sands. Produced by David Puttnam; released by Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)—This tart black comedy on the craving for social position and the art of murder has a brittle wit that came as a bit of a shock: such amoral lines were not generally spoken in 40s movies. The film is heartless, and that is the secret of its elegance. Ninth in line to inherit a dukedom, the insouciant young hero (Dennis Price) systematically eliminates the intervening eight—a snob, a general, a photographer, an admiral, a suffragette, a clergyman, a banker, and the duke—all, by a casting stroke of genius, played by Alec Guinness. Secure in the knowledge that Guinness will return in another form, the audience suffers no regret as each abominable D’Ascoyne is coolly dispatched. And as the murderer takes us further into his confidence with each foul deed, we positively look forward to his next success. With purring little Joan Greenwood as the minx-nemesis Sybilla, Valerie Hobson as the high-minded Edith, Miles Malleson as the poetasting executioner. Based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman, adapted by Robert Hamer and John Dighton. Hamer directed. b & w

 

A King in New York (1957)—Maybe the saddest (and worst) movie ever made by a celebrated film artist. Chaplin mugs archly as King Shadhov, a deposed Ruritanian monarch who becomes a TV celebrity in New York. With Dawn Addams, Harry Green, and young Michael Chaplin, from whom his father coaxed a grotesque performance. b & w

 

King Kong (1976)—The greatest misfit in movie history makes a comeback in this new version. Monster, pet, misunderstood kid, unrequited lover, all in one grotesquely oversized body, the innocent ape is martyred once again. The movie is a romantic adventure fantasy—colossal, silly, touching, a marvellous Classics Comics movie (and for the whole family). This new Kong doesn’t have the magical primeval imagery of the first King Kong, in 1933, and it doesn’t have the Gustave Doré fable atmosphere, but it’s a happier, livelier entertainment. The first Kong was a stunt film that was trying to awe you, and its lewd underlay had a carnival hucksterism that made you feel a little queasy. This new Kong isn’t a horror movie—it’s an absurdist love story. When the 40-foot Kong stands bleeding and besieged at the top of the World Trade Center, and his blonde (Jessica Lange) pleads with him to pick her up, so that the helicopters won’t shoot at him, even Wagner’s dreams seem paltry. We might snicker at a human movie hero who felt such passion for a woman that he’d rather die than risk harming her, but who can jeer a martyr-ape? This film can stand in one’s affections right next to the original version. John Guillermin directed, from Lorenzo Semple, Jr.’s, script; with Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, John Randolph, Ed Lauter, Julius Harris, René Auberjonois, and John Agar. Cinematography by Richard H. Kline; music by John Barry; produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Paramount. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

King Lear (1971)—Blindness and nothingness are the controlling metaphors in this gray, cold Peter Brook production. Brook has a unified vision and never lets go of the reins; there are no accidental pleasures in the movie—and no deliberate ones, either. This Lear is made essentially plotless not by removing the plot (that is practically all that remains of the play) but by using the plot as a diagram for movement abstracted from psychological and dramatic meaning. By the time you’ve seized the outline, the cutting has become jaggedly mannered, with sudden shifts from one angle to another and from long shots to closeups, often while someone is speaking, and then your eyes are punished by blinding flashes that are like exploding bombs. The cutting seems designed as an alienation device, but who wants to be alienated from Shakespeare’s play and given the drear far side of the moon instead? Though Paul Scofield’s stage appearances as Lear are world-famous, he gives a freezing performance here. Only Alan Webb’s Gloucester has a sneaking humanity that occasionally flickers through the stylized acting. b & w (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The King of Comedy (1983)—Robert De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a grossly insensitive, cold-hearted deadhead who is determined to become a TV star like his idol, the comic Jerry Langford, played by Jerry Lewis. The director, Martin Scorsese, must have decided to give us the cold creeps; the shots are held so long that we look for more in them than is there. Scorsese designs his own form of alienation in this mistimed, empty movie, which seems to teeter between jokiness and hate. It’s The Day of the Locust in the age of television, but with a druggy vacuousness that suggests the Warhol productions of the 60s. With Sandra Bernhard as the hysterical Masha, who helps Pupkin kidnap Langford. (Pupkin’s ransom demand is a 10-minute guest appearance on Langford’s late-night talk show.) Also with Diahnne Abbott as the bartender Rita and Shelley Hack as a secretary. From a script by Paul Zimmerman. Released by 20th Century-Fox. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)—Indecipherable, dark-toned movie about brothers and spurious goals and the American Dream. Set in the decaying playground of Atlantic City, in the gray, wintry off-season, it keeps declaring its alienation. Bruce Dern works hard trying to be charismatic as the promoter brother who fronts for black gangsters (Scatman Crothers is the big boss). Jack Nicholson is the artist brother. He does monologues on late-night FM radio, with such pronouncements as “Goodby, written word” and, referring to his own life, “Tragedy isn’t Top Forty—which is just as well.” Trying to act intellectual Nicholson wears a prissy expression, huddles in his overcoat, and gives a dim, ploddingly serious performance. (If the roles had been reversed the film might have had a little energy.) As Dern’s aging, rejected mistress, who is being replaced in his affections by her own stepdaughter, Ellen Burstyn works valiantly, but her role is a series of florid gestures—it’s like all of Claire Trevor’s biggest scenes put together. This is an unqualified disaster of the type that only talented people have; the producer-director, Bob Rafelson, and the scriptwriter, Jacob Brackman, seem to be saying “Let them eat metaphors.” With Julia Anne Robinson as the stepdaughter, Charles Lavine as the brothers’ grandfather, and Garry Goodrow, Sully Boyar, and Josh Mostel. Cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs; a BBS Production, released by Columbia. color

 

King Solomon’s Mines (1950)—A smashing kitsch entertainment—H. Rider Haggard’s 1886 pulp adventure novel about a search for legendary African diamond mines, given the full M-G-M Technicolor treatment, and with an additional romance between an English lady on safari (Deborah Kerr) and the valiant white guide (Stewart Granger) provided by the scenarist, Helen Deutsch. You have to be prepared to put part of your mind to sleep, so that you don’t get too outraged by the colonialist underpinnings of this sort of fiction; the noblest character is the loyal black servant Umbopa (played by Siriaque, a Watusi), who turns out to be the Mashona chief. (In the 1937 British version, Paul Robeson was a magnificent smiling Umbopa.) But one can enjoy this picture for its superb showmanship (and the Watusi dances and the stunning native fabrics). The film was shot in the African highlands—at Murchison Falls and Mount Kenya—and the elephants and mandrills and leopards and cobras are all startlingly clear and close. It’s one exciting incident after another, and there’s even a suggestion of sex, when Kerr and Granger wake after a night of hiding high in a tree and look passionately at each other. (An incident early on, when an elephant tramples a native, may frighten small children, but children generally love the rest of the film.) Produced by Sam Zimbalist; directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton; cinematography by Robert Surtees, who won the Academy Award for it. With Richard Carlson, Hugo Haas, and Lowell Gilmore. Also with Kimursi, of the Kipsigi tribe, and Sekaryongo and Baziga, of the Watusi tribe; the Africans take all the acting honors. (A cut-rate sequel, Watusi, in 1959 had a script by James Clavell.)

 

The King Steps Out (1936)—Those with merciful memories blocked this one out long ago. Josef von Sternberg asked that the film not be included in retrospectives of his work, but he really did make the damned thing. It’s a monstrously overstaged version of Fritz Kreisler’s operetta Cissy, with Grace Moore and Franchot Tone struggling through the scenery playing Princess Elizabeth of Bavaria and the young Emperor Franz Josef. Columbia. b & w

 

Kings Row (1942)—The typical nostalgic view of American small-town life turned inside out: instead of sweetness and health we get fear, sanctimoniousness, sadism, and insanity. Tranquilly accepting the many varieties of psychopathic behavior as the simple facts of life, this film has its own kind of sentimental glow, yet the melodramatic incidents are surprisingly compelling. The time is the beginning of the 20th century, and the hero (Robert Cummings) is interested in the new ideas of Sigmund Freud. (Which is unfortunate: when Cummings, eyes lighted with idealism, mouths naive views on Freud, almost any contemporary audience is bound to break up.) The director, Sam Wood, gets some remarkably well-defined performances from others, though: Ann Sheridan is radiant in the role of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and Betty Field’s frightened, passionate Cassie is a memorable vignette. Charles Coburn and Claude Rains are the town’s doctors; Coburn likes to perform amputations without anesthetics (his special victim is Ronald Reagan), and Rains keeps his daughter locked up in his house. The cast also includes Judith Anderson, Maria Ouspenskaya, Nancy Coleman, and Kaaren Verne. Casey Robinson adapted Henry Bel-lamann’s best-seller; James Wong Howe was the cinematographer; and William Cameron Menzies was the production designer. Warners. b & w

 

Kipps (1941)—Carol Reed directed this genial, endearingly noiseless version of the H.G. Wells novel, with Michael Redgrave as the orphan who works in a draper’s shop and becomes a whiz of a bourgeois success. It’s a very satisfying movie—observant without fuss, sly yet substantial. (The story was later inflated to the point of unintelligibility in the musical Half a Sixpence.) With Diana Wynyard, Phyllis Calvert, Max Adrian, Michael Wilding, Helen Haye, Edward Rigby, Hermione Baddeley, and the famous music hall artist Arthur Riscoe as Chitterlow. The script is by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat; the costumes are by Cecil Beaton. b & w

 

Kiri no Naka no Shojo, see A Girl in the Mist

 

Kismet (1944)—Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich look blithe and take it easy. She dances in the court of the Grand Vizier of Baghdad wearing half a pail of gilt paint, and as the rogue-hero he fusses with sleight-of-hand tricks involving handkerchiefs and knives. This version of Edward Knoblock’s durable kitsch (it opened on Broadway in 1911) comes with a harem swimming pool, and it’s less strenuous than most costume films of the period. Edward Arnold is the villainous Vizier who smiles craftily throughout; when Colman stabs him in that harem pool, he drops his smile—that’s as subtle a nuance of the actor’s art as you’ll find in Kismet. Joy Ann Page plays Colman’s daughter, with James Craig opposite her. William Dieterle directed; Harburg and Arlen provided a couple of songs. M-G-M. color

 

Kismet (1955)—This time, it was Vincente Minnelli who tried his hand with the familiar material, in a Hollywood-doctored version of the Broadway show that featured music derived from Borodin (including “A Stranger in Paradise” and the ubiquitous “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads”). Despite Howard Keel’s relaxed, strong voice and Dolores Gray’s low-down wiles, it didn’t work the way it had on the stage—it had lost its sensual power. This is a fruity, kitschy production—a studio film in the worst sense of the term—and defeat seems to hover over the players’ heads. Jack Cole staged the dances; the cast includes Ann Blyth, Vic Damone, Monty Woolley, and Sebastian Cabot. Produced by Arthur Freed, for M-G-M. color.

 

Kiss Me Kate (1953)—A backstage farce set during the staging of a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel as the warring stars. Grayson’s trilling is something to contend with, and so is her busy, amateurish performance, and there’s a lot of badly placed rambunctious comedy from just about everybody. But there’s also a marvellous Cole Porter score, with such songs as “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?,” “Why Can’t You Behave?,” “Too Darn Hot,” “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua,” and “Always True to You in My Fashion.” And there is Howard Keel, with his strong baritone and his good-hearted leering; a dark goatee gives him more chin and, with his great height, he looks hilarious in Petruchio’s striped pants. And there is the dancing of Bob Fosse, Tommy Rall, and Bobby Van—their “From This Moment On” number, choreographed by Fosse, is one of the high points of movie-musical history; in its speed and showmanship one can see the Fosse style in its earliest film realization. This sequence more than balances out the grossly embarrassing moments, such as the one when Keel tells Grayson, who is about to quit acting and go off with a Texan (Willard Parker), that she belongs in the theatre. Maybe because Grayson looks so uncomfortable—so aware of her shortcomings as an actress—Ann Miller, who obviously enjoys performing, comes off as lively and amusing; she doesn’t just do her usual ticktock tapping, because she’s working with those three leaping male dancers, and with Carol Haney, too. Produced by Jack Cummings and directed by George Sidney, with dances staged by Hermes Pan. The cast includes Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore, who try (and fail) to be delightful clowns, and Jeanne Coyne, Ron Randell, Kurt Kasznar, Claude Allister, and Dave O’Brien. The Cole Porter Broadway show, with a book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, was adapted to M-G-M’s requirements by Dorothy Kingsley—i. e., it was cleaned up and overtamed. (Filmed in 3-D. ) color

 

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)—This Billy Wilder box-office failure isn’t more grating than some of his hits—it’s just more insecure. Essentially, it’s an old-fashioned boulevard farce, but it was generally panned as “coarse and smutty” and “repellent,” and it was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency (the first such condemnation of a major-studio production since Baby Doll, in 1956). United Artists, uneasy about public criticism, sent it out under the label of Lopert Pictures, a subsidiary that usually distributed foreign films. Bad luck plagued this marital-mixup comedy from the start: Peter Sellers, who had been cast as the central character (a composer stuck teaching piano in the desert town of Climax, Nevada), had a heart attack a few weeks into shooting and was replaced by Ray Walston, who is singularly charmless in the role. The plot has the composer attempting to sell his songs to a lecherous star, Dino (Dean Martin), who happens to be passing through town, but he’s so fearful that Dino will seduce his wife (Felicia Farr) that he sends her away overnight and brings in the local B-girl, Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak), to pose as his wife. The central miscasting is compounded by the chortling tone, the overemphatic double-entendres, and the drab look of the film, but there’s something going on in it. Maybe because of all the dumb leering, Kim Novak is touching in her dreamy-floozy, Marilyn Monroe–like role. Her clothes are so tight she seems to be wearing her dresses under her skin; she seems exposed, humiliated. Her lostness holds the film together. With Henry Gibson, Cliff Osmond, Alice Pearce, Doro Merande, Barbara Pepper, and Mel Blanc. Script by Wilder and 1. A. L. Diamond, suggested by a play by Anna Bonacci. b & w

 

Kiss of Death (1947)—A tense, terrifying New York crime melodrama, with an unusually authentic seamy atmosphere; the director, Henry Hathaway, brought his crew in from Hollywood and shot the entire film on location, in such places as a Harlem nightclub, a house in Queens, the Criminal Courts Building, the Tombs, Sing Sing. Victor Mature gives an unexpectedly subdued, convincing performance as a hoodlum convict who, for the sake of his children (their mother has committed suicide), agrees to work with the police as an informer. Richard Widmark, in his film début, created a sensation; he’s a giggling, sadistic gunman with homicidal mania in his voice, and when he grins his white teeth are more alarming than fangs. Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer wrote the script, from a story by Eleazar Lipsky. With the talented, refreshingly unactressy Coleen Gray as the hero’s new wife, and Brian Donlevy, Taylor Holmes, Karl Malden, Anthony Ross, Mildred Dunnock, Millard Mitchell, Robert Keith, and Harry Bellaver. Cinematography by Norbert Brodine; in the nightclub sequence, it’s Jo Jones on drums. (Remade in 1958 as The Fiend Who Walked the West.) 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)—Set in a nameless South American country, Hector Babenco’s film version of Manuel Puig’s famous novel is about a homosexual window dresser, Molina (William Hurt), and a revolutionary, Valentin (Raul Julia), who share a prison cell. Molina tries to comfort Valentin and help him forget his pain and misery by telling him the stories of old movies. Hurt is just about the only thing to look at; he’s very likable in the scenes where Molina reveals his tenderness and warmth and humor, and the picture can work on audiences in the way that Midnight Cowboy did back in 1969. (The times having changed, it can make explicit what was potential in that earlier relationship.) But it’s a slack piece of moviemaking, and as sentimental as the 40s screen romances that Molina is infatuated with; that is to say, it moves an audience at the obvious points. The novel is a sly celebration of the seductive, consoling power of movies; Babenco reaches for something larger, something aggressively moral. Valentin, a Marxist prig and a puritan about pleasure, learns humility and becomes more of a man through his close friendship with the sweetly maternal Molina. And Molina is transfigured through the power of love and happiness and a new self-respect. This Brazilian production, made in English, was shot in Sao Paulo; the screenplay is by Leonard Schrader, the cinematography by Rodolfo Sanchez. With Sonia Braga. Academy Award for Best Actor (Hurt). Island Pictures. color (See Hooked.)

 

Kitty Foyle (1940)—Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her “serious” performance as a white-collar girl whose baby dies. In a long career of giving pleasure, this is one of the few occasions when she failed; it isn’t her worst acting (that’s probably in Tender Comrade) but there’s nothing in the soggy material to release the distinctive Ginger Rogers sense of fun. Dalton Trumbo and Donald Ogden Stewart adapted Christopher Morley’s novel; Sam Wood directed. With Dennis Morgan, James Craig, Gladys Cooper, Florence Bates, Eduardo Ciannelli, Cecil Cunningham, and Nella Walker. R K O. b & w

 

Klondike Annie (1936)—Mae West and Victor McLaglen. They don’t bring out the best in each other. With Phillip Reed, Esther Howard, Harold Huber, and Helen Jerome Eddy. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Paramount. b & w

 

Klute (1971)—Jane Fonda in possibly her finest dramatic performance, as Bree, an intelligent, high-bracket call girl, in Alan J. Pakula’s murder-melodrama. The picture is reminiscent of the good detective mysteries of the 40s—it has the lurking figures, the withheld information, the standard gimmick of getting the heroine to go off alone so she can be menaced (in this case, it’s by a big-shot sadistic sex fiend), and so on. And there’s no conviction in Pakula’s use of those devices; they’re hokum—the shadows and crazy camera angles are as silly as a fright wig. But at the center is a study of Bree’s temperament and drives, and here the picture is modern. The life surrounding Bree’s profession frightens her, but the work itself has peculiar compensations—she enjoys her power over her customers. She’s maternal and provocative with them, confident and contemptuously cool. She’s a different girl alone—huddled in bed in her disorderly room. The suspense plot involves the ways in which prostitutes attract the forces that destroy them. Bree’s knowledge that as a prostitute she has nowhere to go but down and her mixed-up efforts to escape make her one of the strongest women characters to reach the screen. And Fonda is very exciting to watch: the closest closeup never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, she’s Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us. With Donald Sutherland, Charts Cioffi, Roy Scheider, Dorothy Tristan, Rita Gam, Richard Shull, and Anthony Holland. Written by Andy and Dave Lewis; cinematography by Gordon Willis; edited by Carl Lerner; music by Michael Small. Warners. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Knack … And How to Get It (1965)—In Richard Lester’s version of the Ann Jellicoe play (as adapted by Charles Wood), the jokes whiz by so fast that the ingenuity becomes exhausting. The gags don’t go anywhere. Lester gets caught up in surface agitation and loses track of what it’s all for. The story (which is just his jumping-off place) is about three men (Michael Crawford, Ray Brooks, Donal Donnelly) who live in the same London House; Rita Tushingham, a country girl just come to the big city, also moves in. The assured Brooks has a knack for attracting women, and the shy, frightened Crawford desperately wants that knack. The dreamlike David Watkin photography often seems too brilliantly sun-bleached and the film’s spirit is too anarchistically chic and on the side of larky youth. It’s a fashionable, professionally youthful treatment of 60s underground attitudes; the content seems to be the same as the content of TV commercials, and by the time you’re outside the theatre, you’ve already forgotten the movie. The more spurious the spontaneity around them, the more flat the performers seem, though somehow Donnelly’s fevered leprechaun quality comes through. b & w (See Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

 

Knave of Hearts, see Monsieur Ripois

 

Knightriders (1981)—George A. Romero wrote and directed this Arthurian wheeler: the motorcyclists wear medieval-looking helmets with plumes, and they joust on their bikes at the Renaissance tournaments that they stage. They’re a travelling Camelot, with a king, Billy (Ed Harris), who administers a code that is supposed to keep them safe from the hucksterism of the outside world. Possibly, Romero had in mind both the big M-G-M Ivanhoe (1952) and Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack (1971), with its mystical man-of-action hero. The picture isn’t offensive; it’s simpleminded, though, inept, and long (2 hours and 26 minutes). Romero keeps his stunt men whirring by, crashing, flying through the air, but there’s no kinetic drama in the hurtling bodies. Most of the time, we don’t even see the weapons hit the riders and unseat them, and the way that the contests are photographed, there’s no physical grace in the bikers’ athleticism. With Tom Savini as Morgan, Brother Blue as Merlin, Ken Hixon as Steve the lawyer, Warner Shook as Pippin, Amy Ingersoll as the queen, Gary Lahti as Alan (the Lancelot figure), Christine Forrest as the grease monkey, Patricia Tallman as the teen-age groupie, and the horror novelist Stephen King as a beer-swilling rube. Made in the Pittsburgh area. A Laurel Group Production; released by United Artists. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Knock, see Dr. Knock

 

Knock on Any Door (1949)—John Derek as a young delinquent on trial for killing a policeman, and Humphrey Bogart as the lawyer defending him. As the lawyer talks, we see the boy’s grim past in flashback; his father died in prison, he was sent to reform school, his child wife committed suicide. Making this solemn sociological case for him, Bogart is so wearing that you wish he’d stop orating and get out his own rod again. Nicholas Ray directed. Columbia. b & w

 

Knock on Wood (1954)—This Danny Kaye comedy was fairly universally certified as a howl, but some few of us may hear ourselves moaning. Kaye’s talents are violently evident, but they’re sunk in the mud of “family entertainment.” He plays a ventriloquist who can’t control his dummy (the plot resemblance to the Redgrave episode in Dead of Night may not be wholly coincidental) and Mai Zetterling is his analyst. The tiresome, naive young man occasionally breaks out into frenzied satire, but more frequently he just pushes his way through some clumsy routines (if he uses that Irish impersonation again, even the infants may crawl out for a cigarette). Norman Panama and Melvin Frank wrote and directed. Michael Kidd did the choreography; the music and lyrics are by Sylvia Fine. With Abner Biberman, Steven Geray, Torin Thatcher, and Gavin Gordon. Paramount. color

 

Koritsi me ta Mavra, see A Girl in Black

 

Kotch (1971)—Hopelessly warm and coy. With Walter Matthau as a clean old man who is mistaken for a dirty old man. If the gimmick had been reversed, the picture might have had something. With Felicia Farr, Deborah Watts, and Charles Aidman. Directed by Jack Lemmon, from John Paxton’s adaptation of a Katherine Topkins novel. color

 

The Koumiko Mystery Le Mystère Koumiko (1966)—This lovely hour-long documentary about a modern Japanese girl was shot by a Frenchman, Chris Marker, in Tokyo during the Olympics. The mystery is the mystery of human individuality, and Marker’s approach is personal, lyrical. Earlier, he made the short La Jerée, which is very possibly the greatest science-fiction movie yet made. His Tokyo has something of science fiction, too: it looks as if it were built the day after tomorrow, and it’s almost inconceivable that it was ever intended to endure. Koumiko, with her archaic Oriental beauty, walks through this transient World’s Fair atmosphere, seeing herself as an outsider in modern Japan. The movie expresses a new mood—the acceptance of estrangement. In French. color

 

Krieinhild’s Revenge, see Nibelungen Saga

 

Kumonosu-jo, see The Throne of Blood

 

Kvinnodrom, see Dreams

 

Kvinnors Vantan, see Secrets of Women